It's generally inconvenient and sometimes an outright pain in the a* It's what we used to call a kludge when I worked in the tech sector. Of course this means I need to know how I want to print each photo while I'm editing it, but I pretty much always do. I'll print maybe twenty photos on glossy paper in a row, then switch to the matte black cart and print say 15-20 photos on matte paper. Since I use both media types nearly equally, this works reasonably well for me. one for those I'll print on matte paper and one for those I plan to print on glossy paper. What I do with my old Epson 2200, where you actually have to physically change the cartridges, is to put the photos I'm planning to print into two folders on my desktop. Where losing this much ink will totally kill you is if you keep switching back and forth between glossy and matte paper every couple of pints. What the specs are not clear on is whether what is lost is just the black inks, or all of them.Įither way, it seems like poor design when compared with the newer Canon and HP printers, which waste no ink going from photo to matte. I can't remember which is which, but one direction uses 4.5 ml, while the other way uses only 1.5 ml.
I'm in the process of finding an atomizer (any help?) ie a tool that will allow me to SPRAY the size and avoid any strokes.Yeah, even though the printer holds both photo and and matte black cartridges at the same time, the two share one line (really lame, but there it is).Ħ ml, though, is for a round trip, from photo black, to matte black, back to photo black. You need to be very careful in applying the 'size' any (and I mean ANY) brush marks show up and to my eye immediately destroy the look (I'm aiming for photographic, not painterly). I'm thinking: gold dust, or pulverizing gold leaf with pestil/mortar and spraying it, in a transparent medium?
The effect is very powerful, and I'd like to reduce it a bit, almost like you sprayed gold dust on a fiber print - not saturating it, just augmenting the white/cream base. You'll never get a 'white' or any value higher than the base of the leaf with this process, and I'd like to find some way to overcome that. I'll experiment more as money and time allow, but I think I'm onto something, with a few caveats: I still think wax should be the finish, fused (heated) and buffed. I think matt/satin will give better results. Experimentģ) adding a gloss finish pretty much makes the print ugly LOL. You need to adjust your prints and you need to be aware that your highs will be gold (or silver etc.) so choose appropriate prints and adjust the curves accordingly. If anyone can recommend a THICK vellum, that can pass through an Epson 3880 and hopefully doesn't require grounds, I'd appreciate itĢ) on thin vellum, the leaf shows through a LOT, and you lose a lot of upper-register values. I've purchased some vellum and (fake) gold and silver leaf, and some acrylic 'size' (a term I'll use loosely, real size is not acrylic LOL).ġ) you want THICK vellum (which I don't have yet) to achieve a nice 3D look, and to avoid a lot of issues while getting it wet with the size/front varnish. Now that've read a bit, and done some experimenting, I can say a few, tentative, things.įirst, what seems to be the path (for me!) is to print on vellum, and apply the gold leaf on the back of that. What I DIDN'T say in my original post was that I had planned on doing an encaustic finish over a print inked onto gold leaf.